An independent scientist’s observations on society, technology, energy, science and the environment. “Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.” – Carl Sagan

Burning money with solar power in Victoria. Again.

It has been announced this week that the Victorian Government will promote renewable energy by spending $100 million to establish a new regional solar power station, subject to the Federal Government matching its commitment.

Premier John Brumby will announce both initiatives today, focusing on the plan for a 330-gigawatt hours per year solar plant with the capacity to power the equivalent of 50,000 homes.

All right. More kumbaya and rainbows and sunshine courtesy of Brumby.

This proposed new solar power station will supposedly generate 330 gigawatt-hours of electrical energy per year. (The Age article originally mentioned a “330 gigawatt” plant, but they later caught the egregious mistake and edited it.)

How much energy is that?

In 2006, Loy Yang unit A in Victoria generated 15,995 GWh of electrical energy, sent to the grid.
(In doing so, it emitted 19,314,994 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, and a whole lot of other environmentally and aetiologically nasty, dangerous, toxic waste, such as fly ash, SO2 and NO2, as well.) That’s just one example of one of the coal-fired generators, of course.

Therefore, this proposed solar power station is generating about 1.88 percent of that one single coal-fired generating station.

How much will this plant cost? We don’t know. The article doesn’t say, nor does Brumby’s original press release. We don’t know how much it costs, and I doubt Brumby knows, either.

…promote renewable energy by spending $100 million to establish a new regional solar power station, subject to the Federal Government matching its commitment.

OK… we know that it costs at least $200 million. There is actually a convenient benchmark which we can use to make an estimate of how much the whole project will actually cost, and that is the $420 million solar energy installation planned by Solar Systems for northwestern Victoria. This is another expensive solar energy project that the Victorian government just loves to talk about as a poster child for their clean, green ways.

The Solar Systems project, with 154 MW of nameplate capacity, will generate 270 GWh per annum, and will cost 420 million dollars. If we assume that the newly proposed 330 GWh/annum installation might cost about the same, for a given amount of capacity, then we can expect that it will cost 513 million dollars.

To replace Loy Yang A, to have the equivalent amount of energy generation, you’d need 49 such installations of this size, at a cost of approximately 25 billion dollars to construct.

If you build a modern* nuclear power plant, with two 1100 MWe reactors operating with a 90% capacity factor, the plant will generate about 17,356 GWh per annum. That is, such a plant will replace Loy Yang A’s output about 1.09 times over; it’s more than sufficient.

How much does it cost, to build such a nuclear power plant?
Go on, consider an exaggerated, extra-conservative cost estimate from your local greenies. 9 billion dollars? 12 billion? 14 billion? 15 billion?

In every case, even with the most pessimistic cost estimates for nuclear power, it’s far, far cheaper than solar, assuming that you’re actually capable of counting kilowatt-hours.

(* Modern, but not bleeding edge. We’ll consider the presently available modern Generation III LWRs such as Westinghouse AP1000 that are available immediately, not Generation IV fast spectrum reactors, liquid fluoride reactors, or things like that, just to be a little conservative about it.)

Brumby’s press release says that they aim to have the plant operating by 2015. So, they aim to have the plant operating within six years.

Six years? To think that opponents of nuclear energy say that it takes too long to deploy.

If it takes six years to build, and you need 49 of them to replace one coal-fired station, well, would it take 294 years for them to accomplish that goal? Well, perhaps I’m being a tiny bit mendacious. You never know, perhaps they could achieve faster deployment constructing them in parallel, and maybe it would only take 200 years, or 150 years. Maybe.

Six years is in fact sufficient time to construct a nuclear power plant, if you’re serious about doing it and don’t allow it to be delayed. All the nuclear units at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear generating station in Japan were each constructed in timescales of between three and five years; Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Unit 2 and Unit 5 both commenced construction in 1985, and both were completed by the end of 1990, within 5 years. Obviously the Japanese operators failed to see any relevance what so ever of a certain ill-fated Soviet graphite pile to their operations.

Even if you want to talk about conservative, drawn out timescales for the construction of new nuclear power in Australia, say, 10 years maybe, it’s still a far, far faster option, for a given amount of energy delivered, than solar or wind.

Industrial scale PV (which I assume this is) doesn’t make economic sense but helps green utopians believe the nasty coal stations will go away but somehow they never do. PV suits isolated applications like outback water pumps. If costs could get down to say $1 per installed watt it could make sense to cover suburban rooftops in panels since export to the grid requires no new transmission line. That confirmed price reduction remains elusive and now there is no longer the spare cash to spend billions on PV.

John, even though I’m like you and think the whole solar thing is wacky, I’ve pushed for what in the US we call “zoning law” changes that mandate, in certain sunny areas, that all *new* homes have Grid Integrated Solar Voltaics built in as part of the cost of a new home. It would only add a few percentage points to the overall cost of a new home. I have no problems with that at all. But *the* solution? Not even close. Residential use of electricity in the U.S., probably the same there in Oz, is less than 18% of the total load on the grid.

But yeah, baseload solar is something i don’t want to even contemplate paying for.